Samsung Galaxy Camera review

The whole "is it a camera or is it a phone" thing was taken to extreme lengths last year with Nokia's outrageously endowed 41-megapixel 808 PureView. Now Samsung has taken it a few steps further with the aptly named Galaxy Camera, which acts like an Android smartphone, but features a 16.3-megapixel camera with telescopic lens and a host of photo features.

It's on sale now for around £400.

Design

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At first glance, there's little chance you'd mistake the Galaxy Camera for a phone. This looks very much like a midrange digital camera, with a large zoom lens complete with automatic shutter to one side, and a bulge on the other to make handling easier. There's even a tripod screw on the bottom.

Look at it from the back, and it looks every bit the smartphone.

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The entire rear is covered by a single sheet of glass, and almost all of that is taken up by the 4.8-inch HD screen, which delivers an impressively high pixel count of 1,280x720. That's a bit better than the iPhone 5 and puts it on a par with the stunning screen of the Galaxy Note 2.

Pick it up however, and it definitely feels like a camera. At 300g it's a very hefty pocketful to carry around like a phone, even if it can do lots of 'phoney' things thanks to its Android operating system. On top there's a power/sleep button and a large shutter button that you twist to operate the 21x zoom. On the sides there's a covered microUSB port, 3.5mm headphone jack and a lanyard loop, plus a speaker and flash button -- press it and the flash jumps up out of the top, ready for action. On the bottom there's a hatch that hides the battery, microSD card (up to 64GB), SIM card and a mini HDMI port.

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Software

Cameras have run on Android before of course. The Nikon CoolPix 800c springs to mind. But this is the first to run Jelly Bean, and the first from a manufacturer that's at the forefront of Android on mobile phones.

It's running Android 4.1 Jelly Bean -- not the very latest 4.2 version but you can't have everything, and Samsung says an upgrade should be available soon. So you still get Google Now and a very smooth implementation of the operating system -- aside from the weight, it feels exactly like using a smartphone, which will certainly appeal to phone users who want better pictures but start to come out in a rash at the mention of f stops and focal lengths.

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10/10

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You can download apps from Google Play as you would do on an Android phone. Angry Birds? Go nuts.

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It automatically prompts you to set up a Dropbox account for storing and sharing your pics. Your Galaxy Camera will bag you 50GB free for two years, which is handy, but after that you'll have to pay. Samsung has bundled the camera with a Three data SIM featuring a month of free credit too.

The layout and capabilities are more or less the same as any other Jelly Bean smartphone (it won't make calls, but you can check emails, browse the web and view maps). Samsung has done its own skim of the widgets and shortcuts which is mostly cosmetic, but there's a handy camera widget that allows you to scroll through the myriad settings before you fire it up -- so you can choose from an occasionally bizarrely named selection of Best Photo, Best Face, Landscape, Dawn, Snow (?), Macro, Food (??), Indoor, Action Freeze, Rich Tone, Panorama, Waterfall (??!?), Silhouette, Sunset, Night, Fireworks, Night Trace and Beauty Face.

Performance

The quad-core 1.4GHz processor sounds like it should be a powerhouse but the demands of the Galaxy Camera certainly seem to put it to the test. It's no slouch, and generally whizzes through the apps without any hassle. But the camera does take a little while to load up, and there's a delay of over a second after you take a pic, making it not so handy for quick snaps. There is a multi-shot option and the Best Photo feature, which takes pics both before and after you press the shutter, to help with this, but it would have felt more impressive with a faster recovery time.

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There are a quite a few more tricks to play with than you'll get with even the best of other camphones, but basically the layout will be familiar to any smartphone users. Tap and brush to find your way around and operate the settings, with touch controls over on the right-hand side. The basic set-up features camera and video icons, plus a mode button, which takes you to another three icons:

Auto (does what it says), Smart (another chance to set those photo types such as Best Photo, Panorama etc) and Expert, which pulls up a terrific-looking virtual zoom lens and allows you to get deep and nerdy with your focus and light settings.

And what about that camera, with its 16 megapixels of photographic goodness? Well, it has a back-illuminated CMOS sensor capable of delivering 4,608x3,456-pixel images. The aperture stretches from f/2.8 at its maximum to f/5.9 when the zoom's at full. The shutter speed is variable and stretches from 16-1/2,000 of a second.

Picture quality is really very good, with bold, realistic colours, sharp edges and plenty of detail even with the high zoom shots. Low light performance is equally impressive, and less prone to noise than just about any camphone we've tried, even Sony's. The Xenon flash is also a bit softer than you'd expect from an LED flash, which most phonecams use, and helps produce more natural colours. If we're quibbling, it could perhaps be a bit more forgiving of camera motion -- blur seems just a bit too quick to creep in.

That zoom is no toy either. It's a physical zoom for a start, which immediately puts it head and shoulders above the digital zoom you're normally forced to rely on with camphones. They'll give the impression of magnifying the image by effectively spreading the pixels, but image quality goes down sharply as a result. This is the real deal, and can focus on distant objects almost as well as it can in close-up to deliver crisp, clear images from afar.

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There's voice control too, which is a nice gimmick, if not a lot more, and you can take a picture by saying one of four commands: "smile", "cheese", "capture" or "shoot" as well as directing it to record video or zoom in or out (it seemed to find these last two a bit confusing though).

The large screen also makes it fairly easy to edit video onboard too, either with the Video Editor app it comes with or another downloaded from Google Play.

Conclusion The Samsung Galaxy Camera is a weird beast, but it could well find its place in the world. It's not really a phone or tablet replacement, but as a good quality camera with user-friendly, well-developed software for connecting, sharing and editing on the fly, as well as finding your way around and taking notes, it's a very good effort. It's a strong recommendation that it feels like a properly useful device, rather than a Frankenstein mish-mash.